“Let Physics Be the Dream It Used To Be: Or, how to make physics fun”
“I was supposed to be enjoying the wonders of physics! Because physics is super fun when your study group is treating you like a low-IQ charity case because while they were enjoying leisurely study time in the library, you were at your work-study job. Because physics is super fun when your adviser tells you at almost every meeting that you’ll never make it. Because physics is super fun when you start to believe the stories that people are telling you about yourself, just a little, and you hate yourself for being that thing they keep telling you that you are…
I didn’t and still don’t fit into the dominant astro/physics culture, and this has really sucked a lot of the fun out of physics for me… I don’t know how to deal with a community full of people who don’t understand that what they are demanding of us is that we assimilate to their sensibility of what’s “true” and “fair” in science…
Will I stick around? I don’t know. I may not be able to anymore. Because I was struggling to enjoy the work, because of the very real discrimination I faced, and because of random bad luck that can happen to anyone, I struggled to be as productive as many others. Does that signal I don’t have the capacity to make significant contributions to the field? Not particularly. Will it be read that way? Already has been.”
I love this author! It’s all the deeply bottled frustrations, and she’s let them all out. I’m so inspired by that. And I hope that some of her colleagues read this and experienced some piece of that trauma. There is so much emotional toxicity in these kinds of institutions.
